


The Bees and the Birds

by OxfordOctopus



Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [25]
Category: Parahumans Series - Wildbow
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Aiden is Taylor's Kid, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Mom Taylor Hebert, Parenthood, Single Parents, Taylor is 20 in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:34:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,628
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23047867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OxfordOctopus/pseuds/OxfordOctopus
Summary: In which Taylor's a single mother at 20, has nosy coworkers, and Aiden is adorable.
Series: OxfordOctopus' Snips'n'Snaps [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1435474
Comments: 7
Kudos: 94





	The Bees and the Birds

Aiden tucked himself tighter against the jut of her hip, fingers barely sticking out from beneath the too-bulky sweater he had yet to grow into, even a year after getting it. Taylor grunted, steadying herself as she secured him a bit tighter against her side with one arm. He was getting a bit old for this sort of behavior - he _was_ four - but she could give him some leniency, it had been something of a hectic week and if nothing else he was an anxious child.

Swallowing down the uneasy trepidation in her throat, Taylor steadied her step and passed through the sliding doors of the PRT building. It was busy, not unexpected or unusual, though she got a few odd glances from people who were used to seeing her come in this way. On the books, she was a secretary who dealt with things that required a fair amount of informational security, which explained away why she was rarely seen in the building. Off the books, by contrast, she was Weaver; white-costumed bug controller of the Bay who rose into relevance after joining the Wards, going on to join the Protectorate when she graduated from the program. She was a sterling example of what they wanted out of the program, someone with an ‘ugly’ power turned pretty and PR friendly.

Or, at least, she was for all but a single, nine-month-long blip.

“Ms. Hebert?” Ashley Primrose, the woman who ran the front desk close to ninety-nine percent of the time, and who was one of the _very few_ PRT staffers who knew she was anything but what her keycard said she was, looked from her face to the face of her child, to a boy she wouldn’t ever give up, but had nevertheless hidden from the world. She wouldn’t ever be ashamed for what she did, bringing Aiden to term was one of the most precious moments in her life, but isolating him from this, keeping him unchained to her own legacy, had been _important_ , or at least it had been, until last night.

Mustering her courage - and wasn’t _that_ an unusual experience, she was so used to the opposite, for people to shy away from her and her demeanor - Taylor forced a smile to her face that probably looked about as genuine as it felt. “Ashley,” she said slowly, tugging Aiden a bit further up her hip, his cheek squishing against her ribcage. “Could you get ahold of my manager? I need to talk to him about something.”

Ashley nodded, more than a little awkwardly, and turned away to the phone.

Glancing down at the boy tucked into her side, Taylor managed a gentle smile. He glanced up through the reddish-brown bangs he didn’t inherit from her - though, who his father was, she didn’t know, and didn’t really _want_ to, either - and managed a wobbly smile in return. She could still see the fear, though, clustered away in the back of his gaze, almost feral, the source of his neediness. Whatever had spooked him - and it had to be severe, considering - had done damage, and she... she really wasn’t prepared for it. Reaching down with her free hand, Taylor hummed a quiet note and brushed her fingers through the tangly locks, coaxing a broader grin out of Aiden.

“Mr. Richard said you can go up,” Ashley cut in, glancing up from the receiver. Her face was tinged with the barest touches of guilt, and Taylor just about felt her stomach drop. “But, uhm, your coworkers are most likely all going to be present, since nobody’s on duty for another thirty minutes and he’s in office 3-C.”

Taylor felt her face cramp. For all that the rig was nice, the Protectorate still had a... communal room, for lack of a better word, in the PRT building. It was small, cramped, smelled thickly of nicotine from the years Challenger was present, and connected to the ‘C’ offices. Generally, the ‘C’ offices weren’t used because they weren’t very private, they were small, and half the shit they kept on file were in the two other officers. It was, effectively, a walk of shame, there was even a betting pool for who was next to end up making the walk, because most of the time the ‘C’ offices weren’t _used_ for important things.

Swallowing her sigh, Taylor flashed Ashley a smile, not an appreciative one, but one nevertheless, before carefully turning, avoiding the gazes of a few curious onlookers, and tromping her way to the elevators. Aiden wiggled a bit, apparently getting antsy, but grew quickly complacent when she lifted him just a little higher, enough so that he could bury his face even further into the heavy sweater she was wearing.

Pressing her thumb into the elevator button, Taylor only had to wait a few seconds before the doors slid open in complete silence. The interior of the elevator, like the interior of most of the PRT building, was a mix of utilitarian and stylized; it wasn’t ornate, it wasn’t very pretty, it was instead a metal box with mirror-quality silver surfaces on the inside, accompanied by a small handrail that sat flush against each wall. Stepping inside, Taylor fished her lanyard out from beneath her sweater, dragging her keycard across the reader, the elevator dinging and automatically closing.

“Ma’,” Aiden mumbled after a few seconds into the ascent, drawing her attention back down to him. He wasn’t being wiggly anymore, but there was more focus to his gaze, an identical brown to her own. His voice, muffled a bit by virtue of being smooshed into her side, was wavering, but it wasn’t _upset_. Just... anxious, he was a lot like her in that respect; anxiety ruling his childhood, always hesitating, always second guessing himself. She’d hoped to coax him through it, to put into words what she never had definitions for, but improvement had been... sparse, not that she thought no improvement would be better. “Sor’y.”

Breathing out, Taylor felt the knot in her chest start to untangle. He sure wasn’t like her in that respect, at his age she would’ve pouted and pretended none of this was her fault. “It’s okay, hon,” she said, gently tousling his hair again. “We can’t control that sort of thing, you’re still okay. You’ll be meeting a few people you’ve seen on the television before, but I need you to not tell anyone, okay? You remember the rule, right?”

That got a bobbleheaded nod out of Aiden. “Mhm. No tellin’ people ‘bout the costumes and spiders.” There was a moment of pause, Aiden’s brows scrunching as he tried to remember, through the haze of drowsiness, something he was forgetting. What looked like a lightbulb went off in his head a few seconds later. “Spider secrets,” he whispered, almost conspiratorially, and she could feel his giggly smile through the fabric of her sweater as he tucked in closer, squishing and wiggling in happy little bursts.

She was just glad he was starting to feel better after last night.

The elevator dinged, and the doors slid open silently. The breakroom was unchanged from the last time she’d seen it a few weeks ago, a concrete cube with couches and tables occupied by several half-dismantled coffee machines and one suspiciously whole one flush against the wall. The room was completely silent, an oddity considering everyone in the Protectorate, including Armsmaster _and_ Gearshift - formerly Kid Win - were looking right at her.

Stepping into the room, Taylor quashed the near-need to reach out to her bugs, to offload her expressions into them. She couldn’t modify her emotions that way, but Aiden had gotten spooked the one time she’d cut her expressions off during a meeting with a kindergarten teacher and she wasn’t about to do it again. “How long until he has time for me?” she asked after a moment, giving an unmasked and shocked-looking Clockblocker the side-eye.

“Five minutes?” he croaked, eyes flicking from her face to Aiden’s, between their hair, their eyes, their skin. She could just about see the cogs turning away in his head.

“You have a _kid_?” It wasn’t Clockblocker who blurted that one. Turning to stare, Taylor met Battery’s - Kelsey’s - gaze straight on. Behind her, Assault - Ethan - was giving her a curious but not unkind look. He didn’t seem shocked, which was worrying, considering the only people who should have any knowledge about her being a single mother included Armsmaster, Miss Militia, a few higher-ups, Piggot herself, and her manager, but nobody else.

“Yes, Battery,” Taylor kept her voice even, but not unkind, especially when Aiden began to shift, nervous, anxious. She had the uncharitable urge to yell at all of them for putting her in a corner - putting _Aiden_ in a corner - but smothered it before she could even partially act on the impulse. “I have a kid. His name is Aiden, he is four years old, and he likes your husband more than you.”

That, at least, broke the ice. Clockblocker choked out a laugh, Gearshift sidled back on his heel, looking inquisitively at Armsmaster, and the rest of the Protectorate - diminished, but not gone - glanced between themselves before, apparently, deciding everything was fine. She still got a few lingering looks, particularly from Clockblocker, who looked like he wanted to ask every question under the sun, and was only being held back by the years of PR that had to be, somewhat literally, verbally beaten into his skull until it stuck.

“Why didn’t you tell any of us?” Triumph asked, proving that Clockblocker didn’t in fact, need to pry, because people would just do it for him. Taylor shot Triumph a _look_ , not holding back the mix of frustration and discomfort that the line of discussion was going, but Triumph, hidden beneath his mask, was either undeterred or overcame whatever meagre modicum of decency he had, continuing regardless. “He’s _four,_ you’re _twenty_ , was that the year-long break? You could’ve told us, any of us.”

Taylor breathed out, shutting her eyes and tilting her head back. She’d been... adverse towards the prospect of joining the Wards, had made a knot of excuses in her head to begin with, justifying it all with wanting to avoid teenage drama, even when in the end she fell into one of the most extreme teenage drama stereotypes on the planet not two months after joining. Still, that line of thought had gone to shit when the bank she had been in to get grocery money had been _robbed_ , and she had, to put a word to it, ‘intervened’, which had led to joining the Wards in short order after they read her the laundry list of reasons why it wasn’t a great look to be threatening villains with black widows, even if she had managed to conceal her face without her costume on-hand.

Shaking herself free of the memory, Taylor levelled her stare back on Triumph, on the now quiet room. “I was told to keep it quiet,” she said blithely, reaching down to gently distract Aiden with some more pats on his head. Unaware of the context of the discussion, Aiden soaked up the attention like a sponge, happily rubbing back and forth in sync with the brush of her fingers. “I wasn’t _allowed_ to talk about it, it was my decision to keep him and they made it clear how little they appreciated that.”

Piggot especially, but... the years had remedied that relationship. They weren’t on good terms - Taylor was certain no cape was on good terms with Piggot - but they at least had a cordial relationship and there was a certain amount of grudging respect that Piggot had given her when it became clear she wasn’t handing Aiden off to her father to play heroics.

God, Piggot was going to _hate_ her after this, wasn’t she?

Armsmaster tapped his boot once, a small but noted noise. Taylor looked him in the visor, and after a moment shrugged her free shoulder, letting the topic drop. Tugging Aiden back up a bit so that he wasn’t sliding off her hip, Taylor paced towards the wall opposite to her, where three doors, marked C-1 through C-3, stared right back at her.

People seemed content to either stare at her or go back to their things. Aiden wasn’t acting wiggly, and instead had gone back to that half-doze he’d been in for most of the morning. He hadn’t slept much last night, not with the nightmare, and neither had Taylor for that matter. She was feeling a bit peaky, but then ‘a bit peaky’ might put her off when she had a night patrol shift with Clockblocker, but it wouldn’t _ever_ be enough to put off taking care of her kid.

Finally, after a few more seconds, door 3-C opened. Out of it popped Vista, looking flushed and almost furious. She’d turned seventeen this year, and had taken control of the Wards as was somewhat to be expected. She was, additionally, still dealing with a legacy of being a child hero, and was still stuck in that armored sundress they forced her into when she was eleven. Taylor thought it was a nice look on her, Vista had always been relatively pretty and more than capable of making a sundress seem intimidating, but then again if what she could remember was even passingly correct, most of her issues came from being compared to Glory Girl, the other blonde haired sundress wearing cape in the city.

Speaking of Vista, she had lit up when she saw Taylor, turned her gaze to Aiden, froze, and then repeated Clockblocker’s own back-and-forth eye flicking motion, cogs whirling. Vista had been one of the more attentive members, and so within _seconds_ \- unlike Clockblocker’s generous half a minute - her face lit up in comprehension, then horror, then more comprehension. “You were pregnant!”

There was deafening silence in response to that, during which Vista’s face went from peachy-white to red as a tomato, that was more than a little telling. Swallowing another sigh, Taylor glanced in towards Mr. Richard, who was looking at her with crinkled eyes from inside of his office, then back to Vista.

Hoisting Aiden from her hip, Taylor hunched down a little and looked her little bundle of joy in the eyes. “You like Vista, right?” She hadn’t had time recently to check if his ‘heroic faves’ had changed. She was, of course, his number one - and she was _absolutely_ allowed to be very proud of that - but he had a frequently-changing laundry list of ‘heroic faves’ in places two to twenty. Getting another bobbleheaded nod, Taylor tucked him against her chest, rose, and then offered Aiden out to Vista, who went completely still.

“Bwuh?” Vista managed, but Aiden was already turning around, finding another person to latch onto - he was a clingy kid, not that she minded - and before Vista could manage a reasonable defense, he had locked his arms around her neck and tucked himself against her front. Wobbling a bit, Vista shot her a look of confusion-fear-apprehension-happiness, a rather loaded expression that might’ve been funny to look at, if her son’s trigger event - second generation or not, nightmare caused or not, it was _her_ fault, her fault for not being there, but she could unpack that later - wasn’t the reason why she was here.

“I need to go talk to Mr. Richard for half an hour,” she said calmly, brushing fingers through Aiden’s hair. “Knock if you need me, okay little chickie?”

Aiden took a moment, apparently to steel himself, before nodding resolutely. Taylor forced down the urge to coo at him, turned towards the door, and made to enter it.

“Wait?” Vista asked, bleary and confused.

Taylor didn’t, closing the door behind her.


End file.
